Last year I was able to secure some marketing funds to experiment with the concept of games in marketing. The area I selected to conduct the experiment was a game in Photoshop in order to promote learning and active use. The particular audience was people trying Photoshop who declared themselves as 'novices'.

There are two main directions for game - focus on mastery, or focus on purpose. The former is easier to start with, but it runs out of fuel after some time. It's also expensive to produce new mastery levels. The latter has implications beyond the player's self and depends much more on social. It is the true way to maintain a longer term engagement with your audiences.

Players won't help each other (like they do on forums), but will spend extra time to compete

Social is important, but it truly depends on the game you have, and how social your players are ; its role increases as the direction of the game shifts from mastery to purpose.

It's about the long-term view ; if you expect to make money with every game you are in the wrong business. It's about engagement and changing behavioral patterns (much like education) :)

Since I launched this game last year I have started to look at games I see with a completely different prospective. I have seen a number of engaging games, many with the right social elements too. However, where I see most game designs failing is providing the sense of purpose. Take for example the NPR American Public Media Budget Hero game. I absolutely love it, and think everyone playing it can learn a lot about the complexity of balancing policies. But so what ?! Why should you do it ? Just out of curiosity people will play... once. Will they come again? Will they try to improve, or actively influence others to join? I am not talking about a share on Twitter or FB. I am talking about players actively recruiting others to come. What every great game that aims to develop a lasting relationship with the audiences needs is a sense of purpose. Yes, at one point players will change from perceiving it as a game to viewing it as an activity they engage with to achieve something else. This is when we have permanently changed the players/customers behavior. It's the ZEN every marketer in the world is after with major implications on how brands grow faster.

With the help of our Learning Resources and the Advanced Technology Lab teams, as well as with the help of a number of Adobe people we recruited to help, we launched a second version of the game. We now have much better social integration, and have removed a number of the old bugs. Still, key issues on how to improve the integration of the game installation flow with Photoshop remain. Perhaps we will address it in future versions.